The photographs in this portfolio are the earliest of his work – taken between the ages of eight and (roughly) seventeen – and strike a much different tone than that of his well-known American Surfaces or Uncommon Places. Completely shot in black and white with a succession of early cameras – his first, a Ricoh 35, followed by a Nikon F, Leica M2, and Leica M3 – the mostly portrait work evokes Garry Winogrand or Vivian Maier. There is an innocence in the way he approached his subjects; no one would bat an eye at a camera-toting twelve-year-old. He was free to experiment (his parents allowed him to turn the bathroom in their apartment into a darkroom at the age of six) and free to learn. And he remembers none of it.
As Shore states in the back pages of the monograph, “I realize that I’m writing more as an observer of these photographs than as their author. Editing the photographs, I’ve been aware of how little recollection I have of making them.” However, these early photographs seem prescient of the future of his work. As his editor, Liv Constable-Maxwell, so carefully articulated, “There’s a sense of clarity of your approach at such a young age, prefiguring so much of your future practice.” Even though much of the work is a departure from what we would see him do later, there are definite indications.
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| Stephen Shore, Early Work, 2025 |
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| Stephen Shore, Early Work - Stephen's parents in Rhinebeck, 2025 |
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| Stephen Shore, EarlyWork, 2025 |
Shore learned photography from books: he was given Walker Evans’ American Photographs by a neighbor for his tenth birthday, and explored the work of Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, Robert Cappa, and Helena Levitt. He became friends with the editor of Contemporary Photography Quarterly magazine, Lee Lockwood, who was the first to publish Lee Friedlander, Bruce Davidson, Dave Heath, and Duane Michals. Dave Heath and Shore became friends; Dave taught Stephen how to print and introduced him to his friend W. Eugene Smith. (It seems like Shore rubbed shoulders with just about every influential photographer of the era.) Shore’s only formal photographic education came from taking a class with Lisette Modell at the New School, for which he was given special dispensation because he was just fourteen years old.
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| Stephen Shore, Early Work, 2025 |
As I sat in the dimly lit room and listened to Shore and his editors discuss this early work, I was taken by the way he described his process and the way he sees:
“I see from the very beginning there are two things:
I understood that a camera doesn’t point, it frames. …I look at that picture [points at screen] and see there’s a formal awareness there. I’m thinking about how everything relates to the frame, how everything sits in the frame.The other thing I notice is that there is a necessary gap between the world we experience and the world inside a photograph, and it seems like I understood that at the very beginning. The world inside of the photograph has to be coherent to itself and make sense in its own truncated terms; it is decontextualized from the world, and it has to make sense in terms of that decontextualization. I don’t know how it happened, but I see both of these qualities in the early pictures.”
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| Stephen Shore, Early Work, 2025 |
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| Stephen Shore, Early Work, 2025 |
At one point, Shore was watching the tv screen the event had set up with a revolving slideshow of images, and interrupted himself to say, “Look at this picture! Look at the hands, the space of it!” Thanks to the lack of recollection, Shore was able to remain an outside observer of his own work and appreciate all the cues to what he would go on to create in his decades-long career.
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| Stephen Shore, Early Work, 2025 |
Toward the end of the evening, Shore described what I believe is one of the most interesting ways to approach an ever-evolving photographic body of work. He stated that each new project is a “visual problem,” and that exploring that subject matter is in effect working to solve that problem. Uncommon Places came to a natural end because “there was nothing left to solve.” When Shore began working with the 8x10 view camera, he “found the tool he’d been searching for without realizing he was looking for it.” He believes that a new camera allows for the creation of a photograph he couldn’t have taken before, which in turn leads to a new problem to solve.
This work will be on display at the 303 Gallery in November. I am eager to attend.
